Scheduled to take place with regularity
in Bucharest, involving with each edition new curatorial formats,
«Ars Telefonica» project is conceived as a temporary
platform for exhibition display which intends to bring into discussion
specific components belonging to the contemporary urban realities.
In the context of the issues approached by the curators, «Ars
Telefonica» is more than a punctual cultural event. It becomes
an umbrella-concept where different aspects, related both to the
strategies of communication of contemporary artistic gesture and
to the establishment of a community of interest for this cultural
sector, are translated.

The decision of the curators to appropriate
on this edition a temporary space for exhibition display –
the phone booth – represents an assumed selection which
responds to the actual request of the local art scene to search
for new contexts for dissemination of the contemporary art discourse
in the absence of proper exhibition spaces, mechanisms for promotion
and to create new poles of juncture between art, its venue and
audience. The question dropped by the project is to which extend
a temporary platform of this kind can disturb the behavior of
the art public, the accidental public or of the partners participating
directly to contemporary art production? Do these spaces have
a potential in facilitating or in speeding up the process of social
and cultural exchange?

«Ars Telefonica» consists
of a series of site-specific art interventions displayed in the
phone booths in the central district of Bucharest and an accompanying
program of lectures, discussions and sound performances which
takes place in the space of Centre for Visual Introspection, Bucharest.
The artists’ proposals involve means of expression belonging
to connected cognitive fields, giving to the passers-by the possibility
to choose new coordinates to orientate in the city. The relationship
of the artistic projects with the community life, the cultural
memory of a place and as well with another model of communication,
provoked by the appropriation of an unconventional venue, settles
a change in the public expectations as far as the way art is exhibited
and comes into dialogue with the spectator.